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Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern). I understand why, sort of, since it really wasnt explained at all, and it took me several hours of screwing with to figure out just what it was, and could do. But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good" rather than "that looks complicated, im going to stick with what I know because this scares me".

Accusing people of being scared of it seems a little insulting, IMHO. There are a lot of things asking for our attention these days. Wave asked for it in big ways, and frankly, most of us just didn't have the time to bother to figure out what the hell we're supposed to do with it.

Wave was a victim of it's own complexity. People couldn't figure out (quickly) what to do with it, so they didn't bother.

krou sends this snip from the Maine Civil Liberties Union: "The ACLU of Maryland is defending Anthony Graber, who faces as much as sixteen years in prison if found guilty of violating state wiretap laws because he recorded video of an officer drawing a gun during a traffic stop. ... Once [the Maryland State Police] learned of the video on YouTube, Graber's parents' house was raided, searched, and four of his computers were confiscated. Graber was arrested, booked, and jailed. Their actions are a calculated method of intimidation. Another person has since been similarly charged under the same statute. The wiretap law being used to charge Anthony Graber is intended to protect private communication between two parties. According to David Rocah, the ACLU attorney handling Mr. Graber's case, 'To charge Graber with violating the law, you would have to conclude that a police officer on a public road, wearing a badge and a uniform, performing his official duty, pulling someone over, somehow has a right to privacy when it comes to the conversation he has with the motorist.'" Here are a factsheet (PDF) on the case from the ACLU of Maryland, and the video at issue.

Rarely have a problem with closing files. Much more often have a problem with opening them.
Opt-in GC is nice, but can cause confusion in large systems because it is easy to confuse objects and forget which is GC'd and which must be manually de-allocated. I also like that GC can run when the CPU is not in use. It's like automatically multi-threading your deallocation for speed optimization (at the expense of memory of course).
Agreed on WCF and COM. I think all MS developers are familiar with the term "Dll hell".

Quicksort in C#:
array.sort();
There... done.:)
And yes, I could code quicksort from scratch, but what is the bloody point? I'm not trying to show off and very few people get to see my code anyway.
I argue that picking the "right" language was once a very important thing. These days it is getting to be less so. It is far more important to pick the "right" design pattern.
I recomend the following book for any coder. Know it and live it.
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612

I've never had a problem with C# garbage collection. I close my files when I'm done with them rather than in the descructor for example. I have had many problems with C++ memory allocation and COM reference counts however. I've spent hundreds of hours over the years trying to find out why a given object still has a reference count and is not destructing. I've also spent countless hours tracking weak references and null pointers. Not fun... and never again now that I use C# for most (but not all) of my coding.

In my experience (more than most of you less than others), most slow operations are a result of poor algorithm design. I don't care what language you use, a Theta N^N operation on any decent size dataset is going to be slow. C/C++ really only optimizes the way that calls are made and memory allocation and de-allocation. One of the beauties of modern languages and technologies like C# and.Net is that many, perhaps most common operations such as searching or sorting an array, collection or dictionary are already coded in a very efficient way. The developer can spend more time focusing on functionality rather than optimization.
Additionally, some of what many consider "extravagant useless features" like garbage collection can enhance performance (at the cost of memory) by waiting for free CPU cycles to do unimportant work. And now with multi-core systems, parallel execution is a must for any high performance application. I've done some multi-threading in C and even assembly, but I don't recommend it...
Besides, in a business environment, there is little cost to slow application performance in relation to slow development time. I can write the same application in C# in 1/10th the time it would take to code up in C++ (and never finish in C).

As soon as you said "kenetic energy" it all clicked. The temperature is in effect unlimited by the very nature of E=mc^2. The temperature being a measure of E must be infinite for the particle speed to reach c. Balanced by the fact that the relative mass would also be infinite at c. Nice... Thank you - unless I've got it wrong, then please correct. But it seems pretty simple now.

Since it sounds like you might have an answer, I've had this question for a long time.
If a particles heat can be represented by it's entrophic motion, and since motion is limited by the speed of light, is there an absolute maximum temperature for a particle? Can a particle use uncertanty to violate this limit?
Sorry for the off-topic post, but I've never had a better oportunity to ask this question and expect an intelligent answer.

Talk about appealing to false causality. Was Katrina caused by GW? Who knows. One point of data trend does not make. Is the Arctic Melting caused by the fact that it's getting warmer, along with the rest of the planet on average? That's a pretty hard thing to disprove with millions of points of data all pointing to the same thing "The earth is warming."

Why is the burden of proof on the side of skepticism? If someone wants to claim that arctic melting is caused by man-made global warming, it is up to them to make their case, not the other way around.

FWIW, shipping lanes through the north pole have been possible several times in the past, and never previously have they been considered a sign of global warming.

Perhaps you can answer a question for me. If I understand the concept correctly (and stop me where I go wrong), the event horizon can be defined as the point where any light that were to be ejected (I know, I know not possible) from the singularity perpendicular to the tangent (straight "up") would stop and return. With some simple evaluation, this means that the frequency of any light at the event horizon would be infinite to the "inside?" observer. A similar effect is observed on the "outside" going in whereas the light at the event horizon falling straight in has an infinite frequency to the outside observer. Given the relativistic time stretching effects that this implies, as I understand it, anybody falling in would experience "the end of the universe" as time around him speeds up infinitely. My question is, assuming that I am not simply mistaken about the relativistic effects of the event horizon, is; what happens to that item falling into the black hole when the black hole evaporates? What doest that item experience? Does the universe speed around it up until the black hole evaporates whereby it is released back into the universe? Does the item evaporate with the black hole? Is the item converted into radiation before it gets to the horizon and thus released over time before the black hole evaporates?

Ok, so change my question to: So tell me again how it is that people in the middle paid more tax than they did?

By the way there is only one standard deduction that everyone gets: themselves.

I think you are confusing deductions with exemptions. Every taxpayer gets a standard deduction based on their filing status. For 2006 the standard deduction for a taxpayer filing single is $5,150. In addition, every taxpayer gets a $3,300 exemption per dependent, including themselves. Granted, some taxpayers are someone else's dependent and cannot claim any exemptions.

You have to make within a certain range to qualify for the earned income tax credit - if you make too little money you can't get it. WTF?

I'm not sure why you're even bringing up the EIC, but there is no minimum income level to qualify for it that I am aware of. Earned Income thresholds to qualify for the EIC in 2006 are $36,348 if you have 2 qualifying children, $32,001 if you have 1, and $12,120 if you have none. (If you are married filing jointly add $2,000 to each of those.) If your Earned Income is below those levels, you qualify for the EIC. See http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040.pdf, page 46 for documentation.

Last year I wrote about the shortage of flu vaccines in the US. The flu needs to be taken seriously, because it kills tens of thousands of people in the USA every year. But if you are an otherwise healthy person, you do not need a flu shot. This year's shortage is due to a manufacturing problem, and it highlights the need to make fundamental changes to our health care system. In the meantime, you can probably avoid getting the flu b